Who is to Blame? The War in Georgia.
Two extracts from an article published in Aljazeera.
“Jon Sawyer, the director for the Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting, said US politicians had encouraged their Georgian counterparts to think they had the backing of the US when Tbilisi decided to launch its attack on South Ossetia last week. “The US has for several years now mishandled the situation in Georgia,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The way that Mikheil Saakashvili has approached this [has been by] thinking that he could be an extension of the west, a partner of the United States.”
“In many ways we have given him cause for thinking that, with the many visits to the United States, the talk of Georgia as a beacon for democracy.”
Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees that US encouragement may have made Saakashvili “miscalculate” and send Georgian troops into South Ossetia.”
…………………….
Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the old Soviet Union, said the US had made a “serious blunder” by allying itself so closely with Georgia.
“By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its ‘national interest,’ the United States made a serious blunder,” Gorbachev said in an opinion piece to be published in the Washington Post US newspaper on Tuesday.
Other analysts say that US diplomats may have underestimated the level of anger the US recognition of Kosovo created in Moscow, leaving it fearful that Georgia would assert itself further in South Ossetia.
“The Kremlin made abundantly clear that it would view Kosovo’s independence without Serbian consent and a UN Security Council mandate as a precedent for the two Georgian de facto independent enclaves,” Dimitri Simes, the president of the Nixon Centre, wrote in a post on the Washington Note blog.
“Furthermore, while president Saakashvili was making obvious his ambition to reconquer Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Moscow was both publicly and privately warning that Georgia’s use of force to re-establish control of the two regions would meet a tough Russian reaction, including, if needed, air strikes against Georgia proper.”
Full text here:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/08/2008812204333715324.html
August 14th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Sorry - You didn’t really state it specifically. Are you saying that (you believe that) this conflict is the fault of the US? Or are you mischieviously trying to make the readers think that?
August 14th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Sorry - not at all. I simply want to get a discussion going. What I want to say is that it may not be so easy to allocate blame. See the BBC analysis.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Just one extract from the BBC analysis:
“The truth: This has been a difficult conflict in which to sort out the facts. Russia failed to back up its claims of Georgian atrocities and did not allow reporters and international observers in to check them. Georgia made all kinds of claims that Russia was invading, including a statement that Russian troops had taken over the town of Gori which proved not to be so.
The US and UK at least have chosen to represent this as Russian aggression. Yet it was Georgia that attacked with a rocket barrage which by its nature was indiscriminate. “
August 14th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Here is a fairly detailed analysis of the conflict by an expert on international law:
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,571853,00.html
August 14th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
This whole conflict has severe Cold war undertones to it. Most of the news articles fail to build an accurate picture of the chronological history of Georgia which has led up to the conflict. In particular, it appears that Russian influences “baited” the Georgian army with what they were doing in South Ossettia, especially in the last year. In hindsight, the Russian actions look particularly pre-meditated by dint of having a lot of firepower being deployed in a short period of time. Russian forces operating under various guises including as UN “peace-keepers” and those supposedly in support of the potentially breakaway regions - have acted in a very co-ordinated way, attacking targets completely distinct from those which had attacked or which had relevance to the disputed areas. Like the Falklands War this one counts as an “undeclared” war, and both sides sought to gain the element of surprise by not advertising their planned attacks.
August 14th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Kosovo was a bad precedent. The pseudo-nation of Kurdistan 1991-2003 was a bad precedent for that precedent. I don’t really mind, as a long-time supporter of the values expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but they are still bad precedents. As a supporter of ethnically-cleansed Georgians before supporting ethnically-cleansed Georgians was hip, I think that the country to blame is self-evidently the country that has violated the territorial integrity of Georgia since 1992. Georgia, the EU, and the US have been more foolish than one might wish, but this does not remove one jot nor tittle of Russia’s culpability.
August 15th, 2008 at 12:18 am
This article tries at least to piece together the sequence of events leading up to and through the conflict. Other articles are just sound bites in comparison.
September 15th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Where are you, Klaus? It’s been awful quiet in this corner of cyberspace.
September 15th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Finishing off a book chapter, and getting ready to bring out a third edition of my book: Ecology of Marine Parasites. Besides: putting a few knols on the web.
I shall become active again soon. Thanks for reminding me.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:27 am
Extract from: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,578422,00.html
NRC Handelsblad
About the authors: Ruud Lubbers is a member of the Earth Charter Commission, former prime minister of The Netherlands and the former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Joris Voorhoeve is the former Dutch Defense Minister. Jan Pronk is the former UN Special Envoy to Darfur, former minister of the environment and former minister for development cooperation. Tineke Lambooy is a lawyer and expert on Georgia. They are all members of the Round Table of Worldconnectors in the Netherlands, a think tank focused on global issues.
A Call for Concrete EU Actions on Georgia
New European Union policies regarding the Caucasus must strike a balance between Europe’s concerns and the needs of the region’s countries and people. At the same time, Europe must also distance itself from the confrontational position Washington has adopted towards Russia.
…………
The decision of Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili to take military action in South Ossetia was most likely underpinned by the belief that the West, including the US and the EU, would support and defend Georgia. Recent events now confirm how wrong he was. Yet there is no question that Russia’s invasion, for which it was surprisingly well-prepared, was clearly disproportionate.
………….
At this point, Europe must avoid the temptation to place blame. Even if Russia is far from innocent in other regional conflicts, for example in Chechnya, the reality is that the global balance of power has changed radically. We must avoid launching a crusade against Russia and remain sensitive to the humiliation that is systematically and widely felt by Russians.
Not only in Russia, but also in the rest of the world, there is a widespread feeling that the West has acted far too arrogantly toward Russia in the past few decades. Russia has tolerated this begrudgingly. But the country’s windfall oil revenues and growing economic power has reshaped geopolitics. With greater force than before, Russia points to the “double standards” of Europe and the US, not only in relation to Israel and Palestine, but also in terms of the invasion of Iraq and the war on terrorism. Russia maintains that the importance given to human rights appears to vary in accordance with the perpetrators involved. But in this respect, Russia is also guilty of hypocrisy.
November 8th, 2008 at 6:31 am
[...] a previous post I drew attention to the difficulties in attributing blame for the outbreak of the war between [...]